We’ve made it to episode #5 of this six part mini-series exploring LDS church growth struggles as studied in the recent journal article titled, “End of Growth? Fading Prospects for Latter-day Saint Expansion” (article in full linked below)
In today’s episode, the focus of analysis is on the following three points:
- The historical ‘gathering to Zion’ mentality has created isolationist culture to those gathered; has left many parts of the world with few members to grow the church; has therefore defaulted heavily on Utah-centric “world-view”, with secondary privileging of US “worldview”; less so on the rest of the world
- Occupational hazard of itinerant missionaries with low investment to quality conversion and hyper-focused on number of baptisms
- The accelerated baptism program of the church which pressured all parties from mission presidents to missionaries to aggressively pressure lay people to quickly decide to be baptized with inadequate time to understand not only what they were learning about but also to acclimate to a new social network, belief system, an ideology
The next and final episode of this series tackles perhaps the most fascinating concept explored in this report: a proposal that the LDS church's stance as God's only "true church" is at the foundation of the various administrative struggles that have impeded the church's ability to grow.
Link to the article analyzed in this series: https://jmssa.org/stewart/
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